What the Kids Actually Believe

A casual conversation behind an LDS church exposes how protest culture, social media, and schools are manufacturing political reality.

I am a creature of habit—at least when it comes to my mornings.

I’m up at 4 a.m. First stop is getting the coffee going: a Keurig cup to start, followed by a pot of Black Rifle “Awaken the Neighbors” roast for the next dose of rocket fuel. Then I open my usual spray of web news from across the globe and absorb headlines for an hour or so, maybe jot down some essay ideas. At 5 a.m., I get dressed for my run and dog walk, get Ellie and Murph bundled into their coats with leashes attached, and we head out by about 5:15.

The advantage of this routine is that a few neighbors keep similar hours. I run into the same people at the same spots almost every day. Because not many are out at such an ungodly hour, it’s a small group, and some have moved past the head-bob stage and sometimes stop to chat for a few minutes. My dogs know their dogs, it’s a thing. It reminds me of my grandmother’s old party-line telephone circuit down in Mississippi.

Sunday morning, I stopped to let my furry charges romp around a big area behind one of the LDS churches about a mile and a half from my house and ran into Tom (not his real name), a guy about my age with a similar career and education background—and two beautiful Labradors. He asked if I’d been following the local news about walkouts at area schools and universities. When I told him I had, he shared an interesting story.

Tom has a daughter and son-in-law who own their own business, finally getting traction after years of startup struggles and growing pains. They know firsthand how hard it is to make a small business work. One of their kids is a sophomore at the University of Utah; the other is a senior at a local high school. Both are solid liberal/heterodox thinkers (liberal in the classical sense, not progressive) and have worked part-time in the family business since it began.

They all gather as an extended family every Saturday night for dinner at Tom’s house. This past Saturday, the conversation naturally turned to the news of the week and Friday’s “strike.” Tom asked his grandkids what they thought about the protests and what the protesters were actually protesting. According to him, this is what they said:

Most young people don’t even know what they’re protesting. For roughly 80%, it’s simply an excuse to feel part of something. Public school culture focuses on whatever the trendy current thing is. Four years ago it was LGBTQ and bullying, two years ago it was transgender kids, and last year—after Trump was elected—it transitioned (no pun intended) to support for illegal aliens. They are like honeybees buzzing from flower to flower.

Most don’t just get their news from social media; they get it from each other on social media, in an instant-messaging version of the old party game Telephone.

Both kids said virtual school during Covid made things worse. They lived entirely online, and instead of being flooded with information, their channels narrowed and became highly curated to feed only what they already wanted to hear and see. Even after schools returned to normal, those networks remained.

Their sense of history is extremely narrow and short. When one of the kids brought up Obama’s stated position on immigration and deportation in class, the rest of the students didn’t know—and didn’t believe—he’d said it. They assumed it was Trump.

They also said teachers aren’t what parents remember. Some teachers are openly anti-religion, anti-capitalist, and anti-white. Those who aren’t are afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs. Because school administrations are solidly secular, religious, conservative, and capitalist people self-select out of a toxic environment, don’t get hired, or simply decide they don’t want to teach.

Teaching materials are explicitly left-wing, agenda-driven, anti-conservative, and overtly anti-Trump. Almost every class includes a built-in dose of activism.

Most students have little to no civic education. They know virtually nothing about how America was founded (other than it was racist) or how government works—except for those who want to be “activists.”

Many juniors and seniors are economically illiterate.

Many believe ICE is literally a military force attacking minorities and interning them in camps, including children. They also believe American citizens are being kidnapped and renditioned overseas for political reasons. Some believe Renee Good and Alex Pretti were intentionally ambushed and murdered by Trump’s government.

Most are being conditioned by both parents and teachers to expect the worst from anyone who disagrees with them, and they’re being indoctrinated not to trust any information that doesn’t come through their own personal networks.

Many believe that if an immigrant comes here illegally, avoids law enforcement for a while, and finds a job, that constitutes legal citizenship—and that any illegal immigrant child enrolled in public school is equivalent to an actual citizen.

Many believe it’s acceptable to disobey any law they personally consider unjust without consequence.

On the bright side, they said there are solidly conservative kids—but they’re the 20 of the 80/20 split.

Folks, this is in Utah—a place once considered among the most conservative in America.

Andrew Breitbart was prescient when he said politics is downstream from culture, and what’s happening in these schools is culture being rewritten at scale.

People ask me how we change our path. It has to start with these kids.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: adults created this environment, and adults are allowing it to continue. Children didn’t decide to replace civic education with activism or substitute feelings for facts. They were allowed—or taught—to do that, and now we’re acting surprised by the results.

Civilizations don’t drift indefinitely because eventually reality reasserts itself. My fear is that we’ve postponed that moment so long that the lesson will arrive through some sort of Malthusian hardship instead of reason.

Magical thinking always feels compassionate in the moment. It’s only later that the bill comes due.